Safe 0.5 Released

Originally posted 2008-04-09 13:16:31

I just released version 0.5 of Safe, the open-source command-line password management program written in Ruby. This version adds diffing and merging Safe password files. I keep my Safe file on a USB thumb drive, but I also copy it to the various computers I use in case I don’t have my USB thumb drive with me. Sometimes the files get out of sync. Now I can diff and merge the files.

I also ran into some problems with passwords not authenticating. It seems that the XML parser was behaving somewhat differently, adding white space to the salt and hash used to authenticate your master password. After kicking around various options, I moved the salt and hash to attributes of the <safe> root element, which is really where they belong. This fix in not backward compatible, so you need to manually edit your .safe.xml file (back it up first!), cutting and pasting the <salt> and <hash> elements as attributes of <safe>, like this:

<safe salt='abc123FGH987=' hash='123456abcdef123456abcdef'>

(Note: I need to update the instructions on the web site, which are automatically generated from the README–I just noticed that my embedded <s and >s aren’t being translated.)

Update: web site fixed